# ethics discussion

Tom Ritchford (tom@mvision.com)
Tue, 27 Feb 1996 08:48:22 PST

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    Ben Jackson <bjj@sequent.com> did not have a good time...
    >In message <199602261617.LAA18720@kanga.INS.CWRU.Edu> , Seth I. Rich wrote:
    >> It's a difficult
    >> thing to have, for example, a RL mess which takes place in part on the
    >> MOO.  It takes an amazingly responsible person (IMO) to resist the
    >> temptation that exists when in such a situation.
    >
    >As someone who was a victim of a less than amazingly responsible person
    >when such a situation arose, I must say that I don't think a code of
    >ethics would have made a bit of difference.  She was out for revenge
    >and felt that destroying hundreds (thousands?) of hours of my work was
    >a reasonable "punishment."  I think she did it because she could get
    >away with it.  I'm sure if murder were restricted only by a "code of
    >ethics", she would have considered killing me.

    There's no excuse for deliberately destroying work.
    That's about as low as you can get.

    OTOH, I make off-site backups of every scrap of code I write.
    Even the most well-intentioned MOO administrator might end up
    losing the database.  When we first started Id, there was a
    terrible crash right while the database was being backed up
    onto tape -- and it turned out that the site was using only
    a single tape to backup to.  So we lost several month's work,
    although we'd luckily not had too many characters as yet.

    But I had some more-or-less up-to-date off-site backups
    of just my code so I was OK.

        /t

    Tom Ritchford     tom@mvision.com, tom@weirdos.com

    Verge's "Little Idiot" -- Music for the mentally peculiar.
    1-800-WEIRDOS           http://www.fly.net/~tom/verge.html